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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

A few of my healthcare social media friends were talking about why there was no #HIT100 this year and suggested that in true social media fashion someone should pick it up and run with it and I was nominated. I’m always happy to run with a good idea. Especially when @ShimCodeoffered to take care of the hard work. We also wanted to respect that we didn’t start the #HIT100 and so we created our modified version called the #HIT99. In open source we’d call that a fork of the original project. Hopefully we can still have the same spirit of fun and healthcare social media discovery that was embodied by the original #HIT100 (See last year’s unofficial list).

The first #HIT100 was started by @theEHRGuy as a great way to celebrate the Fourth of July holiday and turned out to be a fun way to get to know many of the various healthcare social media influencers throughout the summer. This summer we hope we can do the same with the #HIT99.

If you missed past versions, the #HIT99 is a way for you to recognize your peers, friends, and heroes who have been contributing to the #HealthIT, #HITsm, #hcsm, #HITchicks, #hcldr, and other related communities through their tweets, blogs, books, etc. Your nomination is a small reward for their efforts and all of the nominations in aggregate make for an amazing list of people working to improve healthcare. Plus, we’re looking at having a great #HIT99 celebration/meetup at 2016 HIMSS in Las Vegas as well.

In order to make the nominations more meaningful, we ask that all nominations include the person being nominated, the #HIT99 hashtag, and a short phrase or hashtag identifying why you’re nominating that person. Explaining “Why” is not required, but you’ll receive bonus points from the person you’re nominating and the rest of the community for doing so.

Here’s an example nomination: “I nominate @HITConfGuy to the #HIT99 list, because he makes it easy for me to filter through the mass of tweets during HIMSS.”

We’ll be using the following rules for counting nominations:
1. Twitter accounts must have existed prior to today.
2. The nomination process is completely socially biased, but we’ll filter obvious abuse where reasonable (Did the Chilean Princess with no followers really nominate you?).
3. RTs will be counted if they include the required elements.
4. Thank you RTs by the person being nominated will not be counted, but we do encourage sincere gratitude being expressed to those who nominate you. If you remove the nomination from your tweet you’ll have more room to show thanks without cluttering the stream.
5. There will only be one round of voting.
6. Please do not include the #HITsm or other hashtags unless they apply to the person(s) being nominated. Let’s be conscious of unnecessarily adding tweets to everyone’s stream.
7. Nominations will be counted at the sole discretion of the hosts (This is for fun anyway, so don’t stress it.)
8. Last but not least, you must have lots of fun!

I’m looking forward to seeing all the nominations and the final list of 99 healthcare social media influencers. Plus, I can’t wait for all the tweets joking that they’re part of the 99.

Legal Disclaimer: By submitting a nomination, you agree that any statements are your own opinion otherwise you would not have written or tweeted the message. All statements, whether funny or not, are your own information and thoughts. Funny tweets add no weight to your vote, but if you make us laugh we’ll love you for it. All other generic disclaimers apply, we just couldn’t take up any more words to state them.
Thanks @Matt_R_Fisher

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

One of the interesting topics of discussion at HIMSS was around the delay of ICD-10. However, I have yet to find an answer to what I think is probably the most important question around ICD-10. I posted the question and some other thoughts related to the question on the EHR Guy’s passionate post about ICD-10. Here’s my question and comments:

“What are the true benefits to using ICD-10?”

I’ve read story after story about ICD-10 (including this post) and so far I’ve only seen people giving general lip service to the basic idea that more specifically quantified data will somehow have a benefit to the healthcare system. Darren in the comment above says, “The fact that ICD-10 helps so many electronic and quality initiatives right now, or as pointed out above, are, in fact, required to achieve them”

What are the electronic and quality initiatives to which he speaks? What are the true benefits that we’ll get if we go to ICD-10? I haven’t seen enough of these examples.

We could also look at this same question another way. The rest of the world has been using ICD-10 for a lot longer than us. What have been the benefits that the rest of the world has seen from their use of ICD-10 that we haven’t seen in the US since we’re still on ICD-9?

I’m not trying to say that there aren’t benefits. I’m just saying if there are, then why aren’t we hearing more stories with concrete examples of the benefits? If there are, I’d love to see them and make them more widely known.

The EHR Guy offered this reply:

What you are asking for is reasonable and fair.

I will post, in a future blog, examples of why migrating to ICD-10 has beneficial clinical quality outcomes other than the intended reimbursement aspect of it which has been the main purpose of implementing it here in the United States.

But in essence a deep specificity would eliminate the erroneous coding accompanied by bulk documentation to justify the claim to be reimbursed.

Achieving semantic interoperability with erroneous coding is impossible. I’ve been in aggregation projects where abstracting information from HL7 messages was futile because no one in the healthcare organization seemed to understand what was contained in them.

This will be a very lively topic for months to come. I look forward to your participation in the discussions.

I look forward to the EHR Guy offering some more concrete examples in future blog posts. Although, I think this question deserves much more attention. I’ll admit to not being an expert on ICD-10. I know enough to be dangerous. So, I’d love to hear some of the real life benefits that ICD-10 has provided other countries and/or the benefits the US will get from ICD-10 implementation.

If we don’t have more stories and example of these benefits, then instead the stories related to the cost and inconvenience of ICD-10 (which are easy to find) will dominate the conversation. If that’s the case, then we can be sure that ICD-10 will be delayed.

Free EMR Newsletter Want to receive the latest news on EMR, Meaningful Use,
ARRA and Healthcare IT sent straight to your email? Join thousands of healthcare pros who subscribe to EMR and HIPAA for FREE!

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We never sell or give out your contact information. We respect our readers' privacy.